


A Sanctuary for Birds

by aegistheia



Series: Wayfinders [1]
Category: Bastion (Video Game)
Genre: Conversations, Coping, Depression, Evacuation Ending (Bastion), Gen, Healing, Hope, Post-Canon, Referenced Semi-Canonical Minor Character Death, Suicidal Thoughts, Worldbuilding, mentions of attempted genocide, really a lot of conversations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-19
Updated: 2016-12-19
Packaged: 2018-09-09 18:31:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,330
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8907307
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aegistheia/pseuds/aegistheia
Summary: Journeys hinge on ones – one step forward, one choice to make.  The end of the world – and the beginning of a new one – won’t change that.

  The Kid makes his choice, and her heart starts beating again.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [lace_agate](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lace_agate/gifts).



> Dear recipient, it’s like you reached into my mind, pulled out my full list of future projects, and included as many as possible on your wish list. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to write for you! I hope you’ll enjoy your gift as much as I did writing it. May you have a lovely end-of-2016, and an even lovelier 2017!
> 
> Every playthrough I ever made through Bastion ended with the Pecker chick lost to my party. So that’s going to be reflected in my headcanon moving forward.
> 
> The inclusion of wayfinding was almost entirely inspired by Disney’s excellent _Moana_.

The Kid makes his choice, and her heart starts beating again.

 

\-----

 

_We’re leaving._

_We’re really leaving._

She can scarcely breathe anew, and this time not from the ash and the grief.  Not even from unbridled hope, either; ‘ _leaving_ ’ as a word cannot encompass the sheer amount of preparation that needs to be completed for the metaphorical ropes to be cast off.  This time, they are burning their bridges with eyes wide open.

‘Eyes wide open’, for one, entails plotting a course more concrete than ‘drift with the wind’.  Three days into the Decision she walks into the Memorial to find Rucks with half a dozen or so maps spread over the table.  The Kid is poring over them with him, unblinking, and dutifully marking down routes as Rucks murmurs under his breath.

To her inexpert eyes, only a third appear to even have wind flows recorded.  “Lunch,” she says, then, and to their synchronized blinks, “please let me know if you get hallucinations again.  This batch shouldn’t give you any, but I think we’d all prefer not to plot towards an island that doesn’t actually exist.”

The Kid smiles at that, bashful and accepting as they make their way to the Distillery.

“Aw, it was only that one time,” Rucks demurs, chuckling to himself.  “The Cores can overcompensate for certain characteristics if they’re not guided to restore things properly.  It’s why we made the Monument.  At least the mushrooms were still edible, hm?  I expect the black markets would have been ecstatic about how psychoactive they are now,” he adds pensively.

“The black markets aren’t navigating for us, so their opinions don’t count.”  She hesitates, then, as they swallow their first mouthful with noises of enjoyment, continues, “Rucks, you never said...  Why do we need to burn the Cores and the shards?”

“We can’t leave if we don’t.”

She’d had a feeling.  At the same time...  “Why?”

Rucks can’t ever be accused of stalling for time, but he takes a long time chewing his bite.  “The Mancers found one more new use for Cores, see.  The Cores take in what is around them, but they’re still minerals.  Ores.  A kind of natural resource, right.  Well, those sharp knives found a way to burn them as propellant.  The Bastion’s built to use them Cores as energy if the Memorial doesn’t work, so that we’d get one more fighting chance out there beyond the wilds.

“But you know we have precious little of it now.  So we gotta be careful.”  Rucks waves a hand in needless emphasis.  “Musn’t waste our last chance.”

The Anklegator hatchling whines at the door, shuffling sadly; it’s been banned from coming into any storage areas after that last time with the barrel of Dreadrum and a wagging tail.  She watches the Kid gathers their dirty dishes, then walk over to crouch at the door and scratch its head with his free hand; watches the hatchling push against him with a scratchy rumble.

“So where are we going from here?”  Her skin is shivering.  Her voice would shiver too, if Ms. Mahone had not so strictly trained impeccable vocal control into her that long lifetime ago.

The Kid does not respond, but Rucks answers.  Rucks always has answers.

“Forward.”

One step at a time.

 

\-----

 

All in all, the day they actually leave is quite unremarkable.  She’d prepared her entire self for this moment for so long that it is more a relief than anything else.  But no, it is unremarkable simply because of the sheer amount of _work_ that is involved.  As modes of transportation go, the Bastion is a vast one for a functional crew of three.

“It was supposed to host a lot more than three people,” Rucks says at the steering wheel, wry and sad at once, as he watches her and the Kid man what stations they can in the rising wind.

She frowns over her set of lines two levels above, running through a mental litany of knots.  “This was supposed to host more people who are trained to work the Bastion, you mean.  Not—”  _Not people like me.  Or Zulf._   People who could not be trusted with city secrets, who know nothing of engineering or architecture or state-developed mechanics.

Rucks has the grace to not dodge or deflect.  “Not just completely untrained civilians, Cael or Ura.  The plan – the hope – was that we’d have some evacuees who already knew how bits of the Bastion was run.  But Mother knows we don’t get to choose survivors.  So the Bastion was designed with that in mind.  It’s not hard to sail, not really.  We _are_ shorthanded, but not so bad that I’m worried.  And,” he adds, more softly, ”no one gets kicked off the Bastion.”

The Kid nods decisively from his precarious perch readjusting the mainsail, and that is that.

They spend the rest of the day double checking their stays and waterproofing, and do not look back.

 

\-----

 

They wake to a rainstorm.

She is dripping when she makes it into the unofficial captain’s cabin that is the waiting chamber below the Monument, and the Kid straggles in looking not much better.  The Mechanical Bull vibrates in greeting, then goes back to shaking every last drop of moisture out from its mechanisms.  They are wolfing down a quick cold breakfast when Rucks ducks in.

“Crippled Garmuth’s parting gift to us, I’m sure,” Rucks smiles as he unhooks his safety line, soaked to the bone from his morning rounds.  Fastening down their rain covers, no doubt.  “Hey, no need for that look. We saw it coming, it’s why we waterproofed our stuff over the last few days.  The winds favour us today, if not the water.  Well, the water will favour our growin’ greens, no doubt.”

To punctuate, the overfilled rain barrel outside topples over.

She is outside with the Kid in short order, fixing shade sail stays and re-establishing stormwater runoff paths so that their tender shoots won’t drown.  It is muddy, squelchy work, and they have five more garden patches to reinforce, and—

Over the crack of thunder, she laughs.

The Kid actually starts, and turns to stare.  He is covered with soil from the knee down, his silver hair is plastered to his skull, and his eyes are very, very brown.  In the distance, they can hear the Anklegator hatchling splashing about in unbridled glee.

She laughs again, relishing in the glow in her belly.  “We survived,” she says wonderingly, “but we just... _survived_.  I think we’ve been surviving all our lives.  But we’re going to learn together, aren’t we?  How to live.”

The Kid’s lips open on a breath.  She watches them curl, then curve, and then the Kid is laughing too, and they are both finally living under the dark, free sky.

 

\-----

 

Zulf does not wake for four more days.

They take turns tending to him in between their duties.  The men would have split up their schedules with wordless experimentation if not for her insistence that they write it down in full detail.  At Ruck’s gentle questioning, she replies, “I’ve had enough of miscommunication.”

Rucks says, “I see,” and commits pen to parchment.

She prefers morning shifts.  They’d placed Zulf in a room with large, spacious windows that let in the dawn and moonrise.  It’s airy and bright, and has a potentially less complicated fallout than if they’d put him underground.  In the golden light of today’s sunrise, Zulf’s bruises fade to spectacular rainbows that reminds her of their lost Pecker chick’s juvenile colours.

She doesn’t shy away from the absent-minded comparison anymore; it’s easier to ignore the sting of remembrance these days.  In the backdrop of loss and renewal, it is only one more note in the symphony.  She strokes a gentle hand over the crooning Squirt tucked into the bed beside Zulf, and the smiles when the Squirt squeaks and snuggles against her.

“It’s all right,” she says softly, “Sleep can do wonders for grief.”

The Squirt makes an unhappy noise, and resumes crooning.  She sighs, and spends a mindful minute just appreciating the deeper hues of blue that the sun picks out under its delicate skin.

The babies have their own version of grieving.  The Squirt curls up to sleep by Zulf’s unresponsive form in anxious attempts to groom him every night.  Not to be outdone, the Anklegator hatchling alternates between their companionship.  They’d discovered, upon idle discussion over one lunch, that the hatchling favours different parts on different bed partners for bedding.  Much to the Kid’s consternation, the hatchling reportedly prefers his face.

The Mechanical Bull hovers with seemingly supreme difference, but judging by the way its vibration frequency lowers to a purr every time she leans up against it when she takes her turn to chart their course, she’s not fooled.  But she does not stop it from ever facing east.  She will not begrudge it the homesickness, or the protectiveness, or the comfort of action.

She can’t empathize with Zulf fully – truth be told, she doubts anyone can – but she understands a little.  There are none who rise to a cause like the true believer, and none who fall so hard when their god dies.  Her world had already started collapsing around her when the Calamity came.  She had already been bracing for a blow.  Zulf, though...

She strums her harp guitar and hums a harmony with the Squirt’s croon.  “I can’t promise that things will turn out well,” she says, “but I can promise that we’ll be here when you wake up.  And we won’t leave.”

She turns to track the sun’s cresting progress, and looks down to meet Zulf’s open eyes.

 

\-----

 

They still take turns to keep Zulf company.

He is not immediately mobile.  Small surprise; despite their best spirits and field treatments, his injuries are still severe enough to keep him mostly bedbound.  She is fine with that; he makes a very amenable audience to her instrumental practice.

In fact, he is not immediately vocal, either.  It’s hard to be less vocal than the Kid, but Zulf remains silent even when they change his wound dressings.  He doesn’t respond when she tells him the stories she and Rucks has been exchanging, either, or the events that he’d missed during his time with the Ura.

So it’s a shock the morning she goes to find his bed empty.  A panicked search reveals that he’s sitting alone on the edge of the Bastion just around the corner, watching the sun rise with his knees dangling over the edge.

He doesn’t have his safety line on.  He tilts his head with her greeting, but doesn’t otherwise react when she kneels and clips it on him.

He waits until she sits beside him.  “So we’re moving forward.”  His tone is very flat.

“Yes.  So...”  So here they are.  “Breakfast?”

“I’m not hungry.”

“All right.”

They sit in slightly stilted silence as she eats her share.  “I didn’t want this,” he says after her last bite in the interminable quiet.

She stacks her cup and plate, and considers the riot of colours painting them bright.  “I’m sorry.”

“That my choice was made for me back then?”  He turns to face her.  “Are you afraid I will jump?”

“Yes,” she says baldly.

He laughs, short and harsh, one hand on his line.  “If I do jump, how would you stop me?”

She mulls over this, then holds out her hand.  “Come with me, please.”

Zulf considers her for a long minute, then takes her hand.  She wraps careful fingers around his, and leads him back into the depths of the Bastion.  If his gait is less stiff than it should be for a bedbound man, she makes no comment.

He does not move nor speak a word in the kitchen until she puts a knife in front of him.  Zulf eyes her, eyes it, then picks it up.  “You’re not worried I’m going to stab myself in the chest with it?”

“If you wanted to you would have already done it.”  She shrugs at his arched eyebrow.  “Today we’re having potato stew for lunch.  There are a lot of ingredients that need chopping.  Could you please start on the tubers?  They’re in the left basket by your feet.”

Again, the heavy weight of a decision being made in slow drips of time.  At last Zulf leans over to grab an apron, and she lets out a breath of her own as she roots around for her stash of ingredients.

They work wordlessly for what feels like hours.  Zulf’s first few chunks are ragged and uneven, and his chopping technique is obviously rusty, but he improves with marked speed.  Soon enough, his hands are fluid with the routine, and it’s time for the hard part.

Through the steady sounds of blades against wood, she says quietly, “Sweeping leaves kept me sane that first week on the Bastion.”

One blade pauses; resumes.

“I couldn’t run from the Calamity.  It was in the air.  It was in the silence.  It was in the emptiness.  And I didn’t want to be underground ever again.

“On my second day the Kid brought me over to the toolshed.  The gardens need tending, he’d said, and the buildings need upkeep.  Everyone is doing their best, but Rucks is old and Zulf is not always very good.”  She snickers at Zulf’s disgruntled expression.  “Could you help, he said.  What would you like to do?

“I tried many things– do you remember that time with the ladder?  You do— Yeah, ah, I promise I won’t do roofwork until I practice my hammering on the ground for another week.  No, I chose the leaves.  I didn’t know exactly why, but now I think I do.

She puts her knife down and closes her eyes.  “It was the rhythm.  The susurrations of straw on grass.  Just me, and the broom, and the ground, and the sky.  Routine and repetitive.  It gave me space to think and reflect.  And it made me look busy so everyone else would leave me alone.”

Zulf huffs a ghost of a laugh.

She smiles and blinks the world back into focus.  “And...”  She judges, then chops the head of the carrot off with such viciousness that Zulf jumps. “Leaves don’t get offended or hurt if I take anything out on them.”

Zulf drops his gaze to his potatoes.  “You can’t save me like that,” he finally says.  “Mundane tasks for living— that’s not the answer.  That was never the answer, or I would have found it as you did on the Bastion.”

“We can’t save you at all.”  Now he does look up at her, surprise in his dark eyes.  She returns his look without flinching.  “The Gods themselves can’t save you, even if they’re still there.  Only you can save yourself.  But we want to help, if you— if you’ll let us.  If you’ll have us.”

_If you decide you want to live after all._

“I didn’t find answers in my piles of leaves, or the straw, or the gardens.”  They have both stopped chopping.  She lays her hands out flat on her cutting board, the carrots an untidy orange pile in between her spread fingers.  “I didn’t find anything but muscle aches and calluses for a long time.  But I did find space, and I did find a way to breathe again, and I did find that I could go back underground after all.”

She smiles through the ache in her heart, at the look in his eyes, as he seems to realize for the first time that they had descended into solid earth to reach this enclave.  “It’s the lowest kitchen here.  And the most powerful; that stove over there is excellent for slow-roasting and large-scale baking.  If you ever want flatbread it’s got a stone surface that actually achieves the proper texture.”

“I don’t bake,” he says.  “But I imagine flatbread like that would taste like home.”

All of a sudden the words are on her tongue, and Mother herself couldn’t stop them from spilling out.  “If you wanted to jump, really wanted to jump, I don’t think we can stop you.  I thought about it too, the first time I sang under the grey skies in Prosper Bluff.

“But the Kid came to me when I sang.  He gave me his hand, and I chose to take it.  He led me away from the edge, and I chose to let him bring me back to the Bastion.  The edge is still here.  I can always change my mind and jump.  If Rucks and the Kid couldn’t stop me from leaving with the Ura, then they can’t stop me from leaving with the winds either.  But they’re here, and they’re willing to stay with me, and maybe I can wait until tomorrow and see if I can find my answers first, so...  so that’s what I thought.”  She tries not to fidget at his stare.  “And... here I am.”  Here they all are.

“How far—”  Zulf clears his throat, and tries again.  He only marginally succeeds in sounding less choked.  “How far would you go back underground, Zia?”

“I would go as far and as deep as I need to go for answers.  I still haven’t found them yet, but I think I might, eventually.  In the people around me.  Maybe my answers might lead me to the winds after all.  I wouldn’t know.  But I haven’t found them yet.  So here I am.  And here I will be, by the Kid’s side, by Ruck’s side.  And by yours, too, if you’ll have me.”

Zulf looks at her— no.  Zulf looks through her, into the distance.  The hairs on the back of her neck prickle, but she doesn’t think he’s in danger of bleeding again, not right now.  “I see,” he finally says.

It is as good as a dismissal.  She takes a step back.  “If you don’t mind, I’ll leave you to it for a bit; I’m not sure where I put the mushrooms...”

“Take your time,” he replies softly.  “I’ll cut them all.”

“Thank you,” she says, equally soft, and takes her leave.

Still, she doesn’t stop the Squirt from drifting down into the kitchen through the door she’d left open.  It’s at least earned the chance to groom Zulf when he is conscious to bear it.

 

\------

 

He is still there, slicing yams when she returns with her basket of fungi.  The Squirt is hovering about him with a little apron tied to its midriff, ready to beg for scraps, and his shoulders are a long, steady line.

The next morning, he is still sitting on the edge of the Bastion when she comes to him.  His face is expressionless, and his mouth flat.  But he tilts his head to her when she sits beside him, lifts his tied safety line, and says, “I don’t think my answers lie over the edge right now either,” and her heart lifts.

 

\------

 

In his characteristic efficiency, the Kid calls for a general meeting to redistribute responsibilities that afternoon.

Zulf walks away from lunch assigned with the least physically taxing tasks. They span both indoors and out, but the unfortunate reality of sailing a structure the size of the Bastion is that most tasks will take place outside of buildings.  This finds Zulf often walking alone to his task – checking lines and stays, perhaps, or monitoring water supplies – and then doubling back to call on one of them for physical assistance.  It only takes three busted sets of stitches over two days and the Squirt’s fussing for Zulf to settle into the routine.  Privately, she likes it; it gives him space, and at the same time forces him to interact with them all.

Breakfasts, though, she makes a special effort to spend with him.  Habits are hard to break.  She’s kept so many moonsets and sunrises in Zulf’s company that her mornings now feel incomplete without him in close proximity.

Today, there is a set of clean dishes by his side, and the Anklegator hatchling pressed up against his thigh.  “I see breakfast was delicious enough for you to lick your plates clean,” she says as she sets her bowl down.

“The Squirt came by to clear the scraps,” Zulf says with a half smile that is... not quite here.

She considers him as she nurses her porridge.  “A fragment for your thoughs.”

Zulf is silent for a long moment.  His hand had gone to his breastbone to clench an unthinking fist around his feather pendant.  The Kid had presented them all with necklaces a few days ago.  He’d crafted mementos with their Pecker chick’s tail feathers in his spare time, and only just finished casting the accompanying chains after restoring the more delicate jewellery moulds.  They’d all put them on to a one, and she’d watched Zulf look as his with a fixed expression before he let it rest against his chest, and realized then that— he hadn’t known.  That they’d also paid a price protecting the Monument.

“What did you hear from our people, Zia?” he says at last.  “What stories did they tell you?”

“Many of them.  The traditions, the good times, the downfall.  The hopelessness.”  The despair had eaten the Ura hollow.  They welcomed her back with wariness, with suspicion.  But they took her in despite it all, because she had Ura blood in her veins, and looked as though she too had walked the road to hell, because in the end, she had as much choice as they had.

Of course, it wasn’t enough in the end, either.  It couldn’t be enough.  Survivors learn lessons the hard way.  Outsiders betray them, and she had never grown up underground like them in the cold.  That they had given her a chance at all spoke volumes.

“Yes.  Our people had no hope.”  His gaze is focused in the distance again, on a place she knows she can’t reach.  “We were going to be massacred for existing at Caelondia’s perceived inconvenience.  If they kill us, we die.  If we fight back, we die.  But if we fight back, we’d have had a chance of winning.  We had nothing to lose if we fight back.”

“But Caelondia is gone because—” _because my father killed them, because the Caels made my father kill people, because the Caels made him make that terrible choice in the narrow space of which genocide to commit—_ “—of their own arrogance.”

“And our survivors want to kill what's left of them for it.”

“‘Our’ and ‘them’, huh.”

He glares at her.  “Yes, ‘our’.  Our blood traces back to the ice and the earth.”

“And our souls trace us back to Caelondia.”  She returns his look evenly.  “Don’t they?”

He leaps to his feet.  She had seen the fire in his eyes before; it was the same one in her father’s gaze the moment before he had shoved her into their home and let himself be dragged away.  “The Calamity ripped our people out from our roots and threw them into the sky!”

“Yes.  They did.  They still want to kill us for it.  They want to kill anyone for it.”

“’Anyone’?  We wanted to make sure a genocide won’t be committed ever again—”

“So how does this make the Ura any different from Caelondia?!”  She’s on her feet now, too, shouting in that raw way that Ms. Mahone had warned her against for risk of ruining her voice.  She doesn’t care.  She doesn’t—  “They’re in pain!  I know!  I get it!  But how does that excuse the Ura for killing people, ‘them’ or ‘us’?!  It’s not the Kid’s fault the Calamity was developed, and it’s not Rucks’ fault that it was set off, and—  The Bastion could _fix things_.  I told them!  And they don’t care!  Or maybe they did care, but they didn’t trust me enough to believe me.  And then what?  We’ll still be dead with bandages in our hands, and the Ura will still be bleeding and drifting in the stars!”

It’s back on his face, that same snarling rictus of pain and rage that he’d worn when he’d thrown Rucks to the ground and gone back to the Ura that first time.  “So, what, we should be satisfied with an _apology_?  Like this undoes all the suffering and death we had to bear?”

“I’m saying the Ura killing us all won’t _fix anything_.  I don’t know what the right thing is to do, I don’t even know if there _is_ a right thing we can do.  But I know killing people like this isn’t the right thing to do.”

“’Like this’— they weren’t aiming to kill for _nothing_ , they were willing to kill for a cause and they’d spared you when you didn’t fight them—”

“So their cause justified them?  When it wouldn’t have fixed anything?”

“They—” Abruptly he deflates.  “They let the Kid go.  They let him take the last shard back, and let him go, and let me go with him.”  He puts his face into his hands, and the slump of his shoulders could write encyclopaedias on unrequited love and unequivocal defeat.  “I don’t know what the right thing to do is, either.  All I know is that I have to go back.  If only— if only to try.  If only...”

The Anklegator hatchling purrs at his feet.  She heaves for her own breath, and remembers what she had found within herself, in the quiet of the Bastion with a broom in her hands and dead leaves all around her: that the desire for revenge could drive her, could fire her blood, and eventually eat her alive.

It was not an answer she wanted, but it was still an answer, and a truth besides.  She’d seen it, too, with her own eyes.  She’d had to see it with her own eyes first; after all, she’d had enough of miscommunication.  The despair had eaten the Ura hollow, but they were not broken, not yet.  No; they had just enough left to pursue vengeance, and then they would be consumed at last.  Death by their own ironic hand.

It is not an answer anyone would want to hear, much less the Ura; it is not neat, it is not easy, it is not pretty, and it is not fair.  It is asking them – her – to walk on ahead with their breast still bleeding.  But survivors don’t get to choose answers any more than the Calamity gets to choose who would live past its dynastic collapse.  And... at the core of it all, she does understand.  In another world, she might have even picked up a pair of guns herself and worn Ura colours to breach the crumbling Walls.  In another world...

“Our people let you go, just as Rucks and the Kid took us in, too.”  She reaches out and touches his shoulder, and he lets her.  “I’d go back for the Ura too, you know.  When we find a new land.  A good land.  We will go back.  Together.  We won’t leave them stranded in the stars...”

His hands rise up to clutch at hers with desperate strength.  She’d be lying if she doesn’t clutch back.

 

\-----

 

Zulf demands to look at the star charts that night.

“All right,” Rucks says.  The Kid follows him to help set the charts out in the Memorial, and she follows because she’s curious, too.  There were a lot of blanks in the maps they’d first used to chart their course from the ruins of Caelondia.

Zulf looks up after only a minute of study.  She looks up with him, because he’s shaking; he is paler than she had ever seen, even paler than when he was on the verge of death.  “You’re not navigating.  The star charts don’t go that far.”

“Well,” Rucks says, “we’ve been filling in our own maps, see—”

“Are we lost?”

“Not lost, exactly.  We’re wayfinding.  Hopefully with a bit more luck than Jawson and his boys, mind, but that’s the essence of it.  Ah, to hearken back to the Days of Discovery...”

“I don’t understand,” Zulf says, voice taut.  “Where are we going?”

“I should’ve mentioned this earlier,” Rucks muses, “since only the Kid and I had been reading these charts.  But to keep it simple: we don’t know where we’re going on a map.  Nobody’s ever gone out this far.  We only know where we are right now.  We keep track by plotting our courses with the Tazal Terminals as the centre.”

“You—”  Zulf stutters into speechlessness, eyes wide.

“You can’t wayfind without knowing where home is.”  Rucks taps the earth with his cane.  “The Bastion is home, but so was where we came from.”

Zulf stares at them.

“It’s where we came from,” Rucks repeats, gentle as moonlight, “so we gotta remember it, right.  All the nice parts, and the bloody parts too.  We won’t know who we are if we don’t know where we came from, much less where we are.  After all,” he adds with a crooked smile, “we don’t have the excuse of Cores to lean on anymore.

“So we’re going forward.  One step at a time.”

She catches her breath despite herself.

Zulf steps back from the table, then walks out into the night.

 

\-----

 

The Kid goes after him.

She stays to help Rucks tidy the table, but he waves her away after the second map.  “I reckon he’s gonna need you more than I am right this moment,” he says, smiling to soften the dismissal.

He’s not wrong, though.  “I’m glad we’re not going to forget our mistakes,” she says, and Ruck smiles again, sad and regretful and acknowledging.

She finds Zulf and the Kid below the Monument, staring out into the night.  The Squirt is hovering nearby making distressed sounds, and the Anklegator hatchling is attempting to smother it in its own show of affection.  She lets them be.  In retrospect, they must have covered the sound of her approach, because she doesn’t think Zulf would start talking if he’d known she was there.

“I never did thank you for bringing me back.  Even if you didn’t have to, you risked yourself to do that.  Thank you.”

It’s something she shouldn’t be hearing.  She is making to step away when Zulf’s next question roots her feet.  “I’d meant to ask you.  Why did you choose to evacuate instead of resurrect?”

She hadn’t asked him that.  She’d assumed, probably halfway correct, but she hadn’t asked.  She hadn’t asked so many questions...

The Kid murmurs something indistinct that makes Zulf laugh.

“Frankly I don’t know if I can trust anyone right now, not even if you swore in the name of Acobi herself.  But I do want to know why you don’t think we can prevent the Calamity from happening again if we went back in time.  Why let that chance go?”

Another murmured answer.

“It’s about _not_ letting go?  What do you mean, it’s about holding on?”

The Kid is quiet for a long, long moment.  His answer is even quieter than before.

“What?  You can’t even be certain we hadn’t already tried to— go back...”

Silence, as the night wind stirs sighs from the grass and the Squirt squirms in resignation beneath the Anklegator hatchling.

“I—... suppose. You’re right.  No, you’re right.  If we _are_ reliving a resurrection then we wouldn’t know it.  We couldn’t know it, because we can’t take what we learned back with us to change anything.  Because— because all the forces that would lead to the Calamity were already in motion.  It was five decades of buildup leading to attempted genocide, wasn’t it...”

Silence, again.

“So it’s best that we don’t go back.  I... understand.”  Zulf sighs, quietly, like a man releasing his handholds above a fall.

The Kid hadn’t given a clear account of what had transpired in the Tazal Terminals, but she can guess.  The Ura are a hard people.  An honourable people.  The Kid had come back to them almost dead on his feet, injured past all reasonable endurance, with only determination to sheathe him in adrenaline and give his failing grip strength.  He’d come back to them with Zulf in his arms, and it had been all they could do to convince him in his insensate condition, to release Zulf and himself into their care.

By then, she’d helped treat enough of his wounds to be a fairly accurate guesser of how they’d come about.  The Kid had walked through the hail of weapons and vitriol and borne it, knowing fully that he might die, and he had not let go Zulf.  He had not let go of the pain, of all the mistakes of Caelondia and the Ura that had led him to slaughter his way into the heart of their land, and he had not let go of Zulf.

She is not surprised that her people had, in the end, let them go.

The Kid is wrong.  Well, partly wrong.  It’s mostly about holding on, yes, but you only have two hands.  If they’re already full, you’d have to let go of something first.

For her, holding onto this new world meant coming to terms with the regret of never saying goodbye to her father in peaceful times.  But she had never had blood on her hands, nor the blinding treble of joy.  For Zulf, and perhaps for Rucks, and the Kid as well, holding on would mean very different things.

And for the Ura...  Well.  Perhaps the Ura had found an answer as well, out on the ice in the sky.  A hard answer, an honourable answer, an answer they would not have wanted to hear.  But it was, in the end, an answer they had found, and an answer onto which they had held.

An answer which they delivered, in the form of the Kid and Zulf, alive, and in the last shard.

Against all common sense, her heart lifts, again.  She doesn’t dare call it hope, and yet.  And yet...

When she goes back, maybe she’ll find out.  What they had found, out amongst the stars.

 

\-----

 

Zulf’s strength is slow to return.  He has not graduated above hauling pots of half-filled water a week later when Rucks seeks him out in the Distillery.  “We need your help,” he says.

“Right now?”  Zulf glances down at the handful of minerals he’s in the middle of sorting with her for their next batch of Falling Malt.  “Can this wait until I finish making sure we’re not going to accidentally poison us all?”

“Yeah, sure, but we’re gonna need you soon.  We gotta modify the engines.”

“Engines?”

“We might not find more Cores and shards, so we’d better be prepared for burnin’ a new kind of fire.  Have you learned anything interesting from your father?  We could use some educated guessin’ about what we might find out here in the unknown.”

“Our machinery will become obsolete so soon?” she says, concerned.

“Not that quickly.  We’ve got time.  But our own story says we should probably start preparing early, right.  Just in case.”

“And then the Monument will just be a monumental wreck unless we find more Cores to burn.”  Zulf bends his head back down to his task with renewed purpose.  “I’ll be happy to help put that behind us.  Let’s start after dinner.”

Rucks smiles at her over Zulf’s dark head.  She smiles a little in return; he’d offered the same paths for her to walk to help her out from her own place of darkness.  She’s still walking, of course, but she’s still _walking_.  Moving forward.

Maybe Zulf won’t stop walking so quickly, either.

 

\-----

 

It takes almost four weeks into their voyage and Zulf’s offhand query for them to realize that they still don’t, in fact, know the Kid’s name.  But when they ask over a particularly raucous dinner, the Kid just shrugs from his lean on the Mechanical Bull.

Zulf raises an eyebrow.  “Names are important.  And you’re important to us.  We should at least know yours.”

The Kid shrugs again, larger and more insistent.  It almost shifts the Bull.

Rucks strokes his mustache, shifting his attention away from the happy Squirt clearing their dishes of scrap food.  “Kid, you don’t want us to use your old name?”

Shrug.  The Bull starts to rumble, a soothing bass it tends to use when she goes to it for the comfort of uncomplicated companionship.

Zulf just looks at the Kid for a long moment, then sighs.  “Maybe the pets could use names.”

“Zulf should name one,” she says immediately.  The Anklegator, belly noticeably distended from its dinner, wiggles back onto its feet, tail swishing.

The glance he gives her is wry, is an _I know what you’re trying to do_ , is acceptance all the same.  “...The Anklegator should be Princess Mary.  As Queen Anne’s daughter.  What do you think of that, hatchling?  You can be Queen when you finish growing.”  The Anklegator flops down at his feet and he laughs.  Then he turns a copper stare on her.  “And you?  What do you think the Squirt should be named?”

She glances at the Kid, who shrugs again, and then Rucks, who winks.  Then she exchanges a look with the Squirt, which had put down Ruck’s plate.  “Guardian Angel.  What do you think?”  The Squirt butts her, then squirms into her arms with a purr.  “We’ll see if you respond to Guardian or Angel more, hmm?”

The Bull almost knocks the Kid flying when they turn their attentions onto it.  “All right, no names for you too,” she says, laughing.

“What about the Pecker chick?”  Zulf stares into the fire.  “It was important to us, too.”

“Well, we can’t name it Guardian Angel anymore, since that’s the Squirt’s now.”  Rucks listens to the Squirt trill very seriously, then offers, “I know you speak fluent bird, baby, but my human throat ain’t built to pronounce a name like that.”

“Sora,” Zulf says suddenly, then ducks his head a little.  “What about Sora?  It’s Ura for ‘sky’.  So we’ll be surrounded by its memory, and we won’t forget.”

“A good name,” she says, and the Kid nods emphatically.

“A good one indeed.  If ever you choose another name, Kid,” Rucks says, “you let me know so I can add it to our story, okay?  For completion’s sake.”

The Kid smiles at that, shoulders loosening.  Lines and boundaries, learned and drawn and respected.  If these life lessons were taught earlier, maybe things could have been so very different.

And maybe the Calamity wouldn’t have happened, and the Ura wouldn’t have been crushed under Caelondia’s colonial subjugation, and she could have been happy...

And this, at the heart of it all, is why she still sings in her heart to realize that the Cores are burned and gone.  Maybes are written out in hope, and hope is a dangerous thing to bear in a breast with just enough power and not enough understanding.  This way, they can’t ever go back and make every mistake again.

 

\-----

 

After everything, it seems only fitting that the Kid sights land first.

She rushes to the edge at the hail with Rucks in tow, binoculars in hand and silently thanking every God listening that the sun sets behind them.  The Mechanical Bull is perfectly happy to let her clamber onto its back for a better vantage point.  “Ah, look!  It’s—”  An enclosure?  A garden?  Wireframe and metal and geometric—  “—a dome?”

“A sanctuary,” Rucks says, then sighs, long and low.  “Were I an architect for a stationary place, I would build a haven like this.”

On the level above them, Zulf says, “it’s a haven that’s designed to keep things out, though.”  She can hear the frown in his voice.  “I’ve seen its like in conservations and such.”

“And a haven to keep things in.  Something bad must have happened, if people needed to be separated from outside...”

Above them, Zulf falls silent.

 

\-----

 

She reaches Zulf fourth.  The Kid is already there, standing at his side with a concerned look on his face.  Princess Mary is curled about Zulf’s feet, and little Guardian is tucked against his side, crooning, crooning, crooning—

“It doesn’t have to be our final destination,” she pants.

Zulf smiles a little, bittersweet.  “I heard you when I was sleeping.  You promised you wouldn’t leave.  But that’s not really a promise you can keep if you think about your priorities.”

No one responds for a long moment; she focuses on catching her breath, and the Kid presumably focuses on standing in soft sympathy.  But Zulf doesn’t wait.  “The Ura understood it best.  We are meant for solid earth.  Not—” he tugs lightly at his safety line, casts a glance at the sky around them “—out of its sight.  But have you realized?”  He sounds almost dreamy.  “The Ura have become people of the stars, too.  They’re sky people, now.  Bird people.  It’s kind of funny that we’ve more in common with the Ura now than we ever have, and it all came about because of the Calamity.”

“Yes,” Rucks agrees, huffing a little as he slides off the Mechanical Bull’s back and stumps his way to them.  “We’ve been told Caels can have a rather apocalyptic sense of humour.  Gotta say, though, the Calamity is a bit much as a punchline.”

She starts, then stares at him.  Rucks had never said anything about the Calamity so plainly before, much less joke about it.  He smiles at her expression.  “I figured I’d have been considered a more acceptable Cael than the rest of you.  So I’d better bear the responsibility that comes with that kind of privilege, right.”

But Zulf laughs.  “I don’t think Rattle-tails know how to deal with birds.  Maybe they’ll be easier pests for the Ura to fend off now.”

The Kid touches his arm.

Zulf closes his eyes.  “I’m just so tired.  I want everything to stop.  To just... stop.  And I know that all you wanted was to find new land, too.  But that’s not a sanctuary.  That’s a cage.  That can’t be my home.”  He shivers.  “I can stop there, but I don’t know if I can stay.  I don’t...”

“Zulf,” Rucks says, gently, “my bones are old, but I’m not so infirm that I can’t still sail some more.  How often do guys my age get to adventure with young ones like you?”

“We don’t have to stop,” she says.  “We don’t have to settle.  You’re right, we need earth and resources.  We’ll need to land eventually.  But survivors adapt.  The Ura will adapt, and so will we.  We can stop there, take stock, refill our pantries, and then we can go.”

“We’ll go with you,” says the Kid, soft, and Zulf turns away to fold into their embrace.

She still takes another look over the horizon.  It’s a sanctuary built like a promise, like a siren song.  But it’s not home, it will never be home, because home is not a place.  Home has never, ever been a place for her.  So she turns back towards her home, and resolves to wayfind their way towards their next destination herself.

In a few minutes, they will break up and start delegating roles for first contact, and repack fragments and tradeable materials, and prepare their spirits and armours and souls.  But not right now.  Now, she closes her eyes to better feel the choice they’d all just made, the choice they’d made together, and listens to her heart keep beating steadily, like the wings of a flock of birds taking flight.

 

 

 

_Aue, aue_  
_We keep our island in our mind_  
_And when it's time to find home  
_ _We know the way_

_Aue, aue_  
_We are explorers reading every sign_  
_We tell the stories of our elders  
_ _In a never-ending chain_

_Aue, aue_  
_Te fenua, te malie_  
_Na heko hakilia  
_ _We know the way_

_\--_ _“We Know The Way”, Moana (2016), Disney_

 

 

 

 

_-fin-_


End file.
